


The End of the End

by draculard



Category: Let's Go Play at the Adams'
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Non-Consensual Bondage, Nothing worse than the actual book, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-04-15
Packaged: 2020-01-13 13:43:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18470146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: Now she is gone. What follows, quite naturally, is emptiness.





	The End of the End

**Bobby**

It’s not cowardice; it’s adrenaline. This much Bobby knows with a clinical certainty no one can take away from him; he read all about it in his father’s dusty old textbooks from medical school — the thick books that line one single shelf in Dr. Adams’ office, the books Bobby ransacked for reading material on rainy afternoons.

He devoured everything in those books. He knows the clinical terms for everything John did to Barbara; he finds it likely that she orgasmed, even though there was blood, even though surely she didn’t like it. So he knows there’s no shame to be found in his own reactions; it’s adrenaline. That’s all.

Adrenaline that leaves him shaking by the window of the tenant house in the rain. Adrenaline that finds him staring out the window with eyes that desperately need to blink, staring into the field and waiting for a lightning flash to illuminate — what? A ghost picking its way through the dry, dead corn? A walking scarecrow coming for him?

It’s adrenaline that makes his vision blur as he waits. His hands are shaking, too, and that’s adrenaline as well; as he wipes his eyes, as he steadies his grip on the shotgun, as he takes short breaths, chest aching and burning, unable to breathe. When he dribbles urine into jeans that are already soaking wet from the rain—

Adrenaline.

Adrenaline. That’s all.

The rest, though — the five days that stretch behind him. The way he cried when John tackled him and pressed his face into the sand. The way he cried just yesterday, standing in the muddy river-water up to his waist and sniffling as the Freedom Five outvoted him…

This, he cannot explain. Not scientifically, not with hormones or physical reactions, not even with the scant knowledge of psychology he’s gleaned from Father’s textbooks. He knows the word that’s rattling around inside his brain, whispering in his ear, but he doesn’t want to hear it. He doesn’t want to understand.

He stares out the window, into the storm.

He waits.

* * *

**Dianne**

Her favorite color has always been gray. When they have icebreakers at each class, at the start of every school year, that’s what she says to grab the other kids’ attention. Out of all the lovely and unlovely colors, she chooses to cherish the color of a rain-laden sky, of kicked-up dust at the bottom of the river, of minnows and frogs.

Of her own eyes.

Dianne likes gray, and she likes other things she’s not supposed to even notice, too. Paul staring at her naked body with those wide, brown eyes of his; the choked-off, painful noises her mother makes sometimes, in the middle of the night. Most of all, she likes the times she has to herself, when she can turn all her concentration inward and think of all the things she knows from books.

The death camps and all that went on there. The gulags. In her mind, she sees a thousand years — no, an entire human history — full of prisoners. Gagged and bound and chained to walls. Unfettered physically, but tied to their captors by a mental string. Skin unmarked; skin so black with bruises it looks to be rotting. Hair falling out in clumps and teeth spit into food bowls with clumps of blood and gums.

She chews these over with an unconscious grinding of her jaw. Were she younger, were she a different girl altogether, she would be absently nibbling on a strand of her own hair, twisted ‘round her finger and brought to her lips as she thought.

In the past (or so she’s read) adults killed and tortured children without a second thought. There was a young king of England who went that way — she can’t recall his name or even what century he was from, but she doesn’t care. Those things don’t matter to her. What matters are the winners and losers, the taste of blood, the inevitable, righteous feeling of your own hands holding a pillow over someone else’s face.

Dianne likes these things, the things no one is supposed to look at too closely. She doesn’t just want to look anymore; she wants to get close enough to smell the decay, to put her nose right up against someone’s rotting flesh. She wants to feel her hands on another person’s neck. An innocent person. A kind person. A loser.

She can’t help it. She just does.

* * *

**John**

It isn’t that he wants to be a man, exactly. It’s that he has no choice. Dianne speaks of life as if every little aspect of it were a game — and if she’s right, then growing up is losing. But being a child is losing, too.

You take your victories where you can get them, John supposes.

In the stiffening of your flesh, the slide of your fingers against your foreskin. In the stretch of a girl’s legs — a woman’s legs — above her head, or as close to that as you can push them. Suffocating closeness, terrifying skin against skin.

John finds that he can go through death, a little one, and come out on the other end alive, breathing fast and strong, tired and invigorated. Alive. That’s all he wants, really — to take his victories wherever he can, before time makes a loser out of him. Out of them all. Even the games that grown-ups play, the nightly dances between a husband and wife, are pale in comparison to what John accomplishes, alone with Barbara, alone with the ropes and the cut-up pieces of her nightdress, alone with his skin, alone with hers.

Fucking your wife, that’s not really winning, John says. You think it is, maybe, because when you were a kid, this was something you couldn’t do. But John is a kid (or at least, he’s not a man yet) and he’s doing it, so he’s winning for now.

And everything after this will be…

Well, in the future, he’ll have other games, he guesses.

* * *

**Cindy**

This year, suddenly every girl at school has a Barbie doll. It’s a doll like nothing Cindy’s ever seen. It isn’t a baby; it’s a full-grown teenage girl. She has long legs, a tiny waist, smooth skin, a bust. Looking at her, she seems older than Cindy. She hears the other girls whispering Barbie’s backstory at school.

She’s a doctor. She’s a big sister, a fashionista. She’s an astronaut.

She’s a babysitter.

But Cindy knows these stories can’t be true. When she takes her Barbie doll, with the long, blonde hair chopped off, and plays with other girls at school, they don’t move Barbie around like an authority figure, barking orders at them in a high-pitched, squeaky voice: Go clean your room. Eat your food. If you’re good, maybe we can all go for a swim.

That’s not how the game goes at all. What they do is — what every little girl does is — they take Barbie and undo all the velcro on her clothes. They leave her naked and they giggle as they spread her little plastic legs as far as they will go. They look at the mound between her legs, the unrealistic little bump. Real babysitters never look like that. They have fur between their legs, and lips and a slit, and wrinkly, unattractive bits hiding underneath it all.

They tie Barbie to a stick with little rubber bands. They float her down the river. They drown her in the muddy water. They take matches to her skin and watch the plastic melt.

 _I didn’t know it would go in like that_ , says one of Cindy’s classmates, looking at the little wooden matchstick, at the hole it's burnt in Barbie’s foot, at the spot where wood and plastic become one.

 _I did,_ Cindy says. _I knew._

* * *

**Paul**

Bobby has his fine bone structure and his pale hair, his aristocratic innocence, his looks that scream money, intelligence, propriety. What Paul has is different, but it’s powerful, too. In its own way.

He has big, wet eyes; a fragile body; a head that twitches and jerks around like a bird’s. He has hair like downy feathers, wild and curly and thin and brown as the forest floor.

Paul is pathetic. He knows that, and he doesn’t know that, all the same. He wields it like a weapon.

In school, at his desk, he spasms, he twists. He watches the teacher but his mind floats away. His brain is writhing, always writhing, and when he lets it go, he doesn’t see the blackboard. Just dirt, and charred, blackened skin. Just worms, just red-hot pokers, just a body.

His breathing gets shallow. If Dianne were here, she would pet his hair and tell him to calm down. She would hold out her hand and in the palm would be a little pill, and in her gray eyes would be something like wildness, only not a wildness that Paul’s familiar with. Dianne’s wildness comes from fear.

She thinks he’ll tell.

He will, he will. But no one will believe him.

Everyone knows that.

* * *

**Barbara**

Dirt, the only god she knows. Daylight, trees and leaves, cicada-song. The smell of wet earth and rotting corn husks after a rain.

These are the things she prays to, in the end. She finds herself with a sudden understanding for what her mother’s always called paganism. Spirits _do_ live in the trees, and in the sun, and in the plants of the forest.

But they live in the dirt, too. She stares up at the sky with sun-strained eyes and water gathering in the corners to wipe the sand of night away. She doesn’t feel the ropes against her skin anymore, or the bruises. The gnawing hunger, the lack of understanding that drove her insane.

The children tie her to the gate, arms out, legs spread. Beneath her, lying atop damp ground and between blades of grass, is a fat, pink earthworm. It twists, and she looks down at it, and she imagines she can see it looking back at her.

Most importantly, they live in the dirt.


End file.
